A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1

by Anthony Boucher (ed)

“Never,” I said, “Mr. Hartley.”

  “Don’t call me Mr. Hartley, call me Hooker, Helver,” he said. “We’re classmates, equals, aren’t we, and we’re friends? Do you know what I’m going to do with you tonight?” he said thoughtfully. “I’m going to take you around to Nivea Saltonstall’s party, the biggest brawl of the season. Nivea, poor girl,” he said. “There’s no doubt she’s a living beauty. I’d marry her myself, maybe, if I was the marrying kind, or if she had the dough. But that’s no dice. Her old man’s Cabot Saltonstall, and he’s down to his last dime. He’s throwing this big party for Nivea to give her a chance to hook some guy with dough. But unfortunately there are more beautiful gals on the market than guys with a hundred grand or so to buy them with. But it’ll be a good party while it lasts. White tie, Helver. And do you have to wrap your hands around your wrists and your feet around your ankles like that?”

  “I don’t know how to dance, Mr. Hartley—Hooker,” I told him.

  “Just drape yourself around the punch bowl and you won’t have to. No one’s going to want you to anyway, after one look at your feet.”

  “But I haven’t got a dress suit,” I said.

  “I wish I could lend you one of mine, but you couldn’t get your feet into the pants,” he said. “You’ll simply have to rent one, Helver—shoes to silk hat. You can do it for fifteen bucks at Moe’s on Washington Street, which keeps open all night.”

  “Fifteen dollars to rent a suit!” I said. “I haven’t got fifteen cents.”

  “Hell,” he said, “you’ve got a million.”

  And he pulled a letter out of his pocket and tossed it to me, a little excitedly. “I saw it in the mail rack in the transept,” he said. “My old man is a director of the company. I saw the envelope and thought it must be for me and opened it without bothering particularly with the address.”

  I fumbled with the envelope. For the moment my fingers were too thick to feel. I unfolded the letter, with the thick bond paper shaking and crackling in my hand. It was from Amalgamated Air, offering me a million cash and a royalty for the rights of the flying wheel which I had developed.

  “A million!” I said. “A million! I can eat whenever I want to now! I can have a three-course dinner every day!”

  “And you can go to Nivea’s party tonight,” said Hartley heartily. “Isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that my determination to take you under my social wing happened to hit at the same time as this? I was just telephoning Nivea about you. Don’t be bashful. She will like you, Helver, I’m sure.”

  I went with him to Nivea’s party that night and met her. Within a week we were engaged; I don’t know yet how it happened. It was such a dream. I remember Hartley drank with us to our betrothal the night it happened, and how smiling he looked and contented, and Nivea’s cold proud eyes, over the rim of the wineglass from which she did not sip, drifting from him to me.

  “Luck to us!” said Hartley. “Don’t forget old friends, Nivea, my darling. A night beneath the moon. To you, Helver, millions, more and more.”

  Nivea’s lips were pressed white at her wineglass rim, and she looked from him to me and closed her eyes. Upon her shy tears, no doubt. Women, Hartley told me, are like that.

  We were married in the spring after I quit college to devote myself to business. I had conditions in history and had flunked philosophy, and even my chemistry wasn’t what they were looking for, quite, so it was probably just as well. Being a married man, of course, I had to work hard, to make money to compensate for the things she had given up.

  Mr. Saltonstall, her father, kindly allowed me to advance him two hundred thousand dollars, with which he went to Paris. The climate of Paris, it seemed, had always agreed with him. And Nivea began the building of her first house. When she started buying the gold bathroom fixtures she was very happy. It was wonderful to see her so happy, when I had time to see her. I was working night and day.

  The next year Hartley’s father lost his money, and I sold Roadless Skyways for five million and ten per cent of the profits—it still pays the biggest dividends after the pocket television which I developed in two years more and put on the market myself.

  So I had been close to Hartley in his youth. I had basked humbly in the shadow of his greatness, and as he grew in fame he did not grow away from me. Nivea’s home and mine was always his. It was my pride to erect the Hartley Hall of Science for him at Cambridge, the most completely equipped workshop that money could procure, with ten-thousand dollar rugs and books and paintings, and to endow the Hartley Professorship of Physics, which he accepted. When he won the Nobel prize, five years out of college, Nivea and I went with him to Stockholm to receive it. He had even allowed me to aid in a humble way in the mechanical side of the problem which had won the prize for him. He was cited for it, as you recall, for developing a technic for filtering starlight rays through radium. I devised the apparatus for doing it one evening in my spare time, though the idea of course was his. All this time, of course, he was devoting himself to his major problem, to the working out of those abstruse and perfect formulae on the curve of space and the parabolic declivity of infinity which he had set as his lifework, and while I was burying my nose in the grimy business of commercial invention, he was working on those equations reducing the cosmos to the nth root, which is the theoretical ultimate conceivable by the mind of man or God. He worked on his formulae and his equations ten years . . .

  CHAPTER THREE

  I remember the evening when he came to me with his final equations. I had been out in Chicago at Gunderson Production Five, my biggest plant, where we were turning out televisors on the belt, ironing out a few small kinks of mass production. I was very tired. Suddenly, because the night was hot and I felt lonely, and the making of money alone cannot altogether suffice for a man, and because I had not seen Nivea for two months, I decided to come home to her. I hopped my plane, took Skyway Route 3 all the way, with the road mostly clear of traffic and no red lights at that hour, and arrived home at the house on Long Island in an hour and a half.

  A butler met me at the door. “Madam has a guest,” he said, “and cannot be disturbed. If you would tell me what it is you wish . . .”

  “You fool!” I said, “I am your master! And I don’t like you, nor your smug smirking face!” And I pushed him away from me like a sack of wheat, and I went leaping up the great marble stairs three at a time, calling “Nivea! Nivea!” Below me the butler was bleating, “It’s Gunderson!” as if I had come to burn the house down or were some kind of crazy tiger.

  I remember the shadowy fox-footed servants running in the halls, and I called to them, “Which is Madame’s room? Show me Madame’s room!” But they would not answer. It was a new house, new servants.

  There were always new houses; there were always servants like weasels. But this night there seemed to me, perhaps because I was red-eyed and tired, more and more. And I was sick of new houses. I was sick of servants. I wanted Nivea. To kiss her hand, to throw myself on my knees before her, Nivea, my wife. My cold, proud, highborn wife.

  “Nivea! Nivea! Show me her bedroom. I’m Gunderson, your master! Where is she? What’s going on here?”

  Then I saw one face that I knew. It was Nivea’s personal maid, Jeanne. She was standing with her back to a door, with her arms stretched out in a cross, and her mustache was trembling with her breathing and her lips were gray and her eyes were locked with terror.

  “Non! Non!” she said. “Mais non! Madame is sick! M’sieu’ must not go in!”

  But I was in a frenzy of terror by then. I thought she might be dying. I took Jeanne by the shoulder and hurled her to the opposite wall. I lunged against the door, and it was locked. I lunged again, and it burst in before me.

  “Nivea!”

  But it was Hartley in the room. He stared at me as I came bursting in. He had a highball glass in his hand, and his hand shook a little, spilling it down on the soft bulge of his waist, as he stared at me numbly.

  “Helver!” he sa
id heartily after a moment, while his face creased in a plump and happy smile. “Just the man I wanted to see!”

  I slapped him on the back and asked about his health. He seemed a little pale, and there was a clammy sweat upon his forehead. But he gulped his highball down, and the color came back into his cheeks.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “I wanted you to join me in Chicago. I thought you were in Cambridge working. What’s the news?”

  “I’ve finished the formulae!” he said. “I couldn’t wait to tell you. I thought you might come home.”

  “Clairvoyance!” I told him with warm admiration. “What a mind you have! Even I didn’t have an idea that I’d be back until two hours ago. Perhaps I heard you calling me, old friend. Where’s Nivea, have you seen her?”

  “Oh yes, at dinner.”

  “Where is she now?”

  I looked around the room. I saw some of her things upon the bureau. Some of her frocks at the edge of the closet door, which had been closed upon them. She had given him her own room, then. She must have moved to some other.

  “Where is she?” I said.

  But he didn’t hear me, or at least paid no attention, he was so excited with his great success.

  “The formulae, Helver!” he repeated. “I have finished them! Don’t you want to look them over?”

  “What formulae?” I said.

  Stupidly, for the instant I had forgot. “What formulae?” I repeated, a little harshly, a little nerve-worn and tired.

  He drew back from me. “You know, the space-time formulae that I have been working on for ten years! The thing that you built the Hall of Science for me for, and established the professorship for!”

  “You’ve finished them at last?”

  “I thought that would knock your eye out!” he said, with a pleased quiet laugh. “Sit down, and look them over.”

  He poured me a stiff drink. I sat down and looked at them. My mind was tired. I was a little slow. I could not concentrate. Figures and graphs.

  “What do they mean?” I said.

  “They mean the way is ready!” he said. “For the great adventure, Helver!”

  I drank the whisky, and the warmth seeped through my blood. I heard far off the singing of the spheres. The great blue voids called to me with a song of winds. Beyond the orbit, beyond the drift, beyond the galaxy! With my breast bared to the hurricane, and the spindrift in my face. Go on! Go on, to the ultimate shore! There are strange lands to be discovered, beyond the trackless sea! And my heart lifted in my breast; it sang; and I clenched and unclenched my hands.

  “What a dream!” I said.

  And Nivea was there; I don’t know where she came from, but she was there on the floor at my feet. With her smooth golden hair about her shoulders, her supple slender form in her silk gown.

  “Oh, Helver,” she said, stroking my knee. “How proud I would be of you! Unknown shores to conquer!”

  “The unknown seas!” I said.

  I stroked her head. But there was no feeling in me. Neither a feeling of heat nor cold. My head was back; my heart roared in my breast; and there was a great calm within my spirit; I heard the calling of the spheres and the singing of the sea.

  “Let’s launch the dragon boat!” I said. “Why are we sitting here? Let’s get it launched, and go! Do we want to rot and grow fat on the dull and deadly shore, when there is a wind upon the sea? Do we want to live forever to stroke a woman’s golden hair, and grub like slaves for the soft pap we eat? To rot and die while still alive! Let’s launch the dragon boat, by God, and we’ll put out to sea!”

  I held my glass out, and Hartley filled it to the brim again.

  I stood up. I took my hand from Nivea. The drink was strong and deep and good. “Let’s go!” I said, crashing down the glass. “The unknown sea! The lightning wrack and the world’s rim! Forever and forever. Beyond the gates of Hercules lies Italy! Beyond the going-down-of-the-sun sea lie golden sands and copper women, and things such as no man has felt or seen! Get out the dragon boat, by God, and we’ll put out to sea!”

  And Nivea was laughing and choking and gasping. Laughing with pride for the glory of me.

  “My Viking!” she said.

  “Can you make the ship, Helver?” said Hartley, looking at me with his great luminous eyes.

  “Can I make the ship?” I said.

  “Do you dare do it?” said Hartley.

  “Do I dare!” I said.

  “What a man you are!” he said.

  “What a man I am!” I said. “To the roof of the world and back! Let’s go!” I said. “Why are we rotting here, when we hear the calling of the sea?”

  So we worked together on the blueprints. Many months. Hartley remained installed in the house, to lend me any theoretical advice, as needed. I was at the shops much still, for I had a million men to feed, men and their families depending on me, and I could not leave things just at loose ends for my own selfish quest. But I gave every moment that I could to going over the plans with Hartley on Sundays and nights when I could get home.

  There came this day when the ship was launched. I remember the day well. By the shore of the blue salt water, in the dawn, the great ship that I had made, all midnight blue and silver, standing in its cradle with its bow pointed to the faded stars.

  “I christen thee Viking!” said Nivea. And I shook hands with Hartley; I kissed Nivea upon her cold proud cheek; I got into the hatchway of the ship. Oh, I was tired, tired. With the sleepless nights and the months of effort and the brain-shattering problems to be solved. But there was a singing in my heart, and I heard the roaring of the spheres.

  “Have you forgotten anything, old man?” said Hartley.

  “If I have, I have my hands.”

  “The wrench to tighten your inside lugs and batten down your hatch?”

  “I have that, all right,” I said.

  “Oh, Helver!” said Nivea.

  For the moment her cold controlled voice seemed to break. Perhaps she was remembering many things, the clumsy awkward youngster whom Hartley had brought to her party many years before, in his cheap rented dress suit, loutish and inarticulate, and his eyes which had lit with a humble and eternal light at sight of her. Perhaps that boy upon his knees, kissing her hand and the hem of her skirt when she said she would be his wife.

  And the inventions, the conquests he had brought her, eager to have her know about them first of all, hungry for her praise. The fame and money, the millions rolling in, the great houses he had given her, his clumsy hands fumbling with her hair. Perhaps she remembered that, and many things. The boy, the man, the work, the dreams, the years.

  I shall never really know.

  And for the moment her voice had seemed to break. But she got control of it. She smiled at me with a brave warm smile, the warmest from her that I had ever known. Oh, but I wished in that moment with a blind and frustrate longing that I had had sons by her, to grow to strong manhood during the years when I should be gone. To find them waiting on the shore when I came back, sons of her body, and of the Viking blood. To throw their arms about me and cling to me with pride, when I came back from the ultimate sea.

  But that was not to be, and never in this life to be.

  Still, her smile was on me warm, and the warmest I had ever known. And I knew that nothing I had ever done before for her had so pleased her as this. Nor anything, in her eyes, was so becoming for me.

  “Good luck! Don’t forget to come back, Helver!” she said, with her warm smile, almost gaily.

  “Nor that,” I said.

  I could see her pride and happiness shining in her eyes, and her cold face seemed suddenly warm, intoxicated.

  I closed the hatch and tightened the lugs. I saw her through the thick glass porthole, clasping the arm of Hartley beneath the armpit, drawing him close to her, as I settled to the controls. The dawn sun shone on her smooth gold hair. Her eyes like the blue of inmost fire, the passionless fire of ice.

  And the wind stirred Hartl
ey’s dark curly hair. It had grown a little thin, I saw. He was a little plump. The soft years had put it on him. In that moment somehow, I do not know why it was, he looked no more to me than a fat and greasy worm, a man with pouch eyes too young, a soft and squashy thing, with a great hollow skull in which no more than empty formulae rattled, and greedy eyes—Hartley, the greatest brain that ever lived! Oh, it was only the distortion of the thick glass which made him seem so, made seem malevolent and vile the smile that was painted on Nivea’s cold face.

  They smiled at me. His arm was around Nivea, supporting her, there on the lofty platform beside me, and she blew a kiss at me, and waved. She shouted something, but I could not hear.

  There was no need of prolonging it. I pushed the electronizer, and I zoomed off. Beyond the orbit, beyond the drift, beyond the limits of the galaxy! Toward the universe’s end, if possible! Toward the answer to the last question, and the sealed books of God.

  Upon that unknown sea . . .

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The rocket went off with a speed faster than light, as I had calculated (said Gunderson). I turned around in the take-off instant to wave farewell, in my last glimpse of earth, at them on the high launching platform, the men upon the ground, the chimney stacks, the blue waters of the Sound. I turned, but before I had got my eyes focused, the whole earth was no more than a fading planet far down the sparkling steel-blue sky. I had shot from the atmosphere in half a breath. In five minutes I was beyond the moon. Her speed increased as she caught the cosmic rays, which began to beat upon her hull like hail. Mars went whipping past like a great red ball of fire.

  In two hours I was shooting past the high frozen mountains of Neptune, and the sun, far down within the wheeling sky at the center of the orbit, was no bigger than the largest star, blue as a diamond. In the bright blue light of outer space the other suns went hurtling past. We gathered speed.

  The parsecs passed like clicking telegraph poles, and each one of them was nineteen trillion miles. Before noon I was streaking upward past the Pleiades, and well upon my way. I curved my bow outward from the drift, past there, steering course 205. As night fell, Betelgeuse, hotter and bigger than ten thousand suns, was dropping like a pumpkin seed far down the sky. I set the controls and slept. It was noon when I woke up. I had slept the clock around, and more, after those exhausting months of sleepless strain. A sleep so long and deep that I sang in every bone, and there was a great restfulness in my soul. Still the weather had grown stormy, and the rocket was pitching in great waves as she sped. My wrist watch was stopping, as though time itself was growing more motionless. There was not a star around. We had passed clear from the galaxy; the Milky Way was only a thin spot of smoke far down the sky; and in the terrific emptiness of inter-galactic space a hurricane was blowing up.